General Motors Co. is looking to get back in the banking business.
The auto maker’s lending arm is drawing up plans to apply for a banking charter, a move that would allow it to accept deposits and expand its auto-finance business, according to people familiar with the matter.
General Motors Financial Company Inc. has been talking to federal and state banking regulators for months about forming an industrial loan company and could file applications to do so as early as December, the people said. It would be supervised by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Utah Department of Financial Institutions, which grants the majority of these charters.
An industrial-loan charter allows companies to own both commercial firms and banks, a setup prohibited by a traditional banking license.
This is familiar territory for GM. The auto maker used this type of charter to operate GMAC, its former lending arm that nearly failed under the weight of soured subprime mortgages and was bailed out by the government during the 2008 financial crisis.
